Page 22 of The Billionaire's Promise

"What do you expect me to do?" she asked, her eyebrows knit together in confusion. I shrugged helplessly.

"Just help me. From now on, you're working twenty-four seven. I'll double your salary. I'll give you whatever you want. Just . . . just stay with us until we get this figured out. Please."

"You want me to move in with you? And Rosalie?" Magnolia looked doubtful. I thought about it. My loft was not ideal for a baby. The space was huge, but I'd only designed it with two bedrooms, mine and the one we were currently using as an office. I couldn't ask Magnolia to work twenty-four seven and then sleep on the couch. Sadly, she wouldn't be sleeping with me. Now was not the time to shake up our relationship.

"No," I said, the answer suddenly clear. "We’ll move in with you. You've got plenty of room, and the yard is much better for Scout."

I could see her thinking, running over the options and evaluating the risks. I was asking a lot. I knew that, but I was desperate. I was not ready to be a father. I'd only gotten my own shit together in the last year. But it didn't look like I had a choice. Rosalie and I were stuck with each other, and I knew in my gut that if Magnolia was with us, everything would be okay.

Finally, she said, "You guys can move in with me, and we can go back and forth to the loft during the day. You do realize that means we'll have to get double of almost everything, right? Two cribs, two changing tables, two of all the stuff we don't even know we need yet."

I grinned in relief. "Who cares? I'm loaded. We’ve got a lot of problems right now, but money isn't one of them."

"We need a list," Magnolia said. She pulled over a notebook and grabbed a pen. At the top, she wrote Crib x2. After that, she wrote Formula, Monitor, Diapers. "What kind of diapers are in that bag?" she asked.

I finished unpacking the bag onto the desk and looked at the diapers. They had cartoon characters on them and the number two. Magnolia wrote it down.

"I have no idea what else we need," she said. "Did Stephanie leave clothes?"

"There's one change of clothes in this bag," I said. "That's it. We have a plastic bottle, one change of clothes, a half-empty package of wipes, a can of formula, four diapers, some dirty rags, and a baby." I hung my head and scrubbed my fingers through my hair. "Fuck. We really have no fucking clue what we're doing. How could she leave Rosalie with us when she knows we have no idea what we’re doing? We don't even have a car seat," I said in a near shout.

"Shh," Magnolia said. "Don't wake her up. The thing she's in is a car seat, I think. The bottom part straps into the car. That's why it looks bigger today than it did yesterday. But we’re going to have to figure out how to get it in the car. I don't even know where the store is to buy all the baby stuff."

She got up and left the room. A minute later, she was back with her phone in hand. "Okay, I found the baby store, and the directions for installing the car seat thing are on the side of the base. We can probably figure that out, but we’re going to end up waking Rosalie up."

She looked terrified at the thought. I was pretty sure the expression on her face was a mirror of my own. Sleeping baby, no problem. I could handle Rosalie when she was asleep, could marvel over her rosebud mouth and soft cheeks. That didn’t mean I was ready to face my daughter when her eyes were open.

CHAPTER NINE

MAGNOLIA

We woke up Rosalie when we tried to put the car seat in the back of the Range Rover. She screamed for a solid five minutes while we drove around trying to find the big box store packed to the rafters with baby stuff. I'd probably passed it a thousand times and never even noticed it was there. I had a feeling I'd be visiting it often.

By the time we got Rosalie back out of the car, her carrier strapped into a shopping cart made to hold it, we both felt like bumbling idiots. A family of five passed us in the parking lot, their infant twins cozily arranged in their shopping cart with a toddler walking beside them, all smiling and laughing as if they hadn't a care in the world. Clearly, they'd figured this out.

"She's screaming," Vance said, watching Rosalie, his vivid blue eyes a little panicked. "What are we supposed to do?"

I looked down at Vance's daughter, her sweet little face bright red, eyes squeezed shut, rosebud mouth wide open and screeching her rage at the world. Or, possibly, rage at her incompetent caretakers. What Vance and I knew about babies wouldn't fill a postcard, and Stephanie had taken off the second she had her check in hand.

"Okay so she's not tired," I said, basing that assumption on the hours she'd napped. "So I'd guess that leaves hungry or she needs a diaper change."

I eyed Rosalie doubtfully, hoping it was option number one. I'd never changed a diaper in my entire life, and I wasn't quite ready to start. Not in a parking lot. Vance opened the back of the Range Rover and set the baby carrier inside, the diaper bag beside it.

Fortunately, Stephanie had left an already mixed bottle of formula in the bag, along with a canister of the weird smelling powder she'd used to mix it up. She'd mentioned that Amy had been nursing, and the formula was a new addition to Rosalie's life. She also mentioned that it was causing some stomach distress. I didnotwant to know what that meant. I had a bad feeling stomach distress in a three-month-old was not good.

For a guy who didn't know what he was doing, Vance figured out the bottle pretty quickly. He got the seal off and the nipple screwed on, handing it to me to hold while he carefully unbuckled Rosalie and picked her up for the first time. His eyes soft with wonder, Vance tucked her into his arm like a football, cradling her against his chest, her head propped up on his bicep, and held his other hand out for the bottle. Wordless, I handed it to him.

As if he'd been doing it forever, he popped the nipple into her screaming mouth. At the first touch, she tried to turn her face away, too furious to realize what was going on. Vance gave the bottle a little shake, and a drop of formula hit Rosie's tongue. That was all it took. Her mouth closed around it, and she began to suck with a vigor that was both reassuring and alarming.

"Hey, there," Vance said as his daughter's eyes focused on his face. "You were just hungry. It's okay, Rosie. I get cranky when I'm hungry too."

There was a good chance my ovaries were about to explode. Vance was hot enough on his own. He would've been hot wearing a trash bag. In faded jeans, a T-shirt stretched tight around his biceps, and Rosalie's little baby head resting against the dark lines of his tattoos, he was too much. When you added in the look on his face, he brought tears to my eyes—tears and a raging case of panty-melting lust.

This was going to be a nightmare.

Vance was even more off-limits than ever. Since the day we'd met, up until a month before, I'd been engaged. Vance had been eye candy, then a close friend, and always my employer. He was not a romantic prospect. Ever. Not even now that I was single. The kiss I refused to discuss was proof enough that I was vulnerable to him. It didn't matter how swoon-worthy he was.

I tore my eyes away from the sight of Vance adoring his daughter and rummaged through the diaper bag, pulling out a plastic lined pad, a package of baby wipes, and a diaper. I had no idea when Stephanie had last changed Rosalie, but I knew we hadn't dared to see what was underneath her pink onesie.